The Jollyman Letters: project progress November 2016

Researching my family history was a joy this month.

Returning from our honeymoon, my new husband and I stopped outside a familiar sight: the thatched cottage in Great Bardfield, Essex, where I and my sisters used to stay with our great aunt, Miss Mary Jollyman.

And we struck it lucky.

Seeing us taking photos, the lady who lives there now came to the door, and hearing my artless prattle, kindly invited us inside and showed us around!

Although the house and garden have been modernised, and the furnishings had changed, there were still many original features in the house which reminded me where the furniture had been. The memories came flooding back, and I now have several more incidents to add to my memoirs of childhood, as well as photos for my book.

We’ve completed the first transcription of the Young Letters and the Millman Letters, and done a few more of the Jollyman Letters. And as a wedding gift, my husband treated me to membership of the Ancestry website, so we were able to research family history documents such as Census results and birth certificates. My family trees for Jollyman, Millman and Young are growing!

I’m starting to get a much stronger feel of our family history as a pattern in time, and I’m finding background information about the other members of their families, their homes and occupations and the places where they travelled.

Instead of just reading some interesting antique letters, now I’m finding the people who wrote them leap off the pages as characters. Stuffy or sentimental, fun-loving or sorrowful, hard-working or feckless, I love them all and I’m so proud that I have this chance to get to know them – my wonderful family.